A thoughtfully designed vintage bedroom creatively combines repurposed furnishings, imperfect finishes, and architectural heritage in original ways. While being charmingly old-fashioned, vintage style can be surprisingly cozy and at moments even cheerfully vibrant. With centuries of décors to choose from, it’s important to remain disciplined, as clutter will soon turn to chaos. Even if vintage rooms should appear assembled effortlessly over time, they should be places where peace and harmony rule. Here are several tips on creating a calm and cohesive vintage bedroom in your home.

Look for inspiration

 

When deciding on the color scheme and decorating theme, take inspiration from a specific time period. Once you set color and motif parameters, you’ll have an easier task shopping for vintage décor and items that go hand in hand with your preferred palette and furniture profiles. Your main fabric should help you with a wall color palette, or you can take a different approach and cover the walls in period-ready wallpaper. You can even create a feature wall by puzzling together various samples of the fabric remains, creating a quilt-like pattern. Time-faded oriental carpets or handmade braided rugs will complement the floor area carelessly. As the ceiling is concerned, embossed tin tiles or picture moldings will make a perfect balance to heavy furniture pieces.

Charm of unexpected

In vintage décor and furniture discussions, words like reuse, recycle, renew, and repurpose are often heard. Since the style works best around rusty forms, refined finishes, and distressed patinas, shop around yard sales, flea markets, garages and attics for sturdy and stylish furniture pieces that are worth reclaiming and restoring. Get a statuesque iron, brass, or four-poster bed as a centerpiece, and update weary wooden pieces like dressing tables, desks, bookcases, and armoires with complementary paint colors, interesting fabrics, decoupage images, or stenciled motifs. Additional vintage touch-ups include hinged brass drawer pulls, crystal knobs and decorative cabinet hinges that can send even modern pieces a century or two in the past.

Authentic accents

Whenever shopping for accessories, keep your preferred color palette and decorating style period in mind. Items that can anchor your bedroom in a specific period include vintage, antique, and reproduction items such as wind-up alarm clocks, table fans, ironstone pitchers, and mid-century pots. Keep the walls alive with groupings of attractive dishes, shapely mirrors, and salvaged windows. With many advantages over traditional drapes, versatile roller blinds have been around for about 400 years, the original ones being made from Scotch linen and without spring mechanisms. These days, roller blinds are chain-controlled, motorized, and spring-operated. Retaining all the charm of days long gone, modern blinds are made in a variety of colors and styles that suit any vintage-aspiring environment. 

Groovy decade

These days, vintage doesn’t apply only to concepts and styles that are centuries’ old but also to some of the iconic decades of the more recent eras. If you’ve always wanted to live in another decade, you can take that passion and apply it into your bedroom décor, taking inspiration from popular architects, prints, and fashions of a specific era. For the groovy 1970s vibe, couple mid-century modern with bold burnt-orange accents. Use cheerful statement pieces, like for example a brightly colored wall clock. On the other hand, make sure to take old trends with a grain of salt, unless you want your bedroom to look like a cheesy movie set. If there are at least two statement period pieces, perhaps that shag carpet is best left out and replaced with a crisp cork flooring.

Tokens form the past

Ask older family members if they’re willing to part with some of the items from their past and you never know what you might get. A disused WW2 era typewriter can become an awesome conversation starter on your table, while a hatbox can become your vintage storage for linens. If you haven’t been able to find a suitable vintage nightstand, a vintage leather suitcase stacked with encyclopedias will work just fine, if not amazingly. Fake animal skins were all the rage in the 1920s era of art deco and modernism. Who’d have thought – your great-grandma might’ve had a leopard print bed throw before the Kardashians.

Forget the modern trends that die out like deerflies at the end of the summer and escape to a timeless vintage bedroom with a ton of retro charm. Appealing and comfortable, vintage bedrooms are surprisingly inexpensive to create, especial if you keep to classic color schemes homemade extra, and salvaged furniture and décor. 

About the Author: 

Diana Smith is a full time mom of two beautiful girls interested in topics related to home improvement, DIY and interior design. In her free time she enjoys reading and preparing healthy meals for her family. 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DianaSmith82; 
Email: [email protected]; 

Guest blogger: Diana Smith